Pei enrolled at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for doctoral studies, and received his PhD degree in 1991.
[1] After returning to China in 1995, Pei worked in the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology.
He was the director of Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences from 2000 to 2007, and the president of Tongji University from 2007 to 2016.
[2] Pei's research focuses on GPCR signal transduction pathways.
His research group discovered new mechanisms of β-arrestin proteins in cellular signal transduction.